Film Schedule

A young aspiring TV 'reporter' discovers his roots in a mountain village of Greece and connects with the history and the kind of
simple people he used to despise. A coming of age journey filmed with an evident deep respect for the abandoned villages of Greece. The dilemma between modern life and rural values in a noble, character-driven drama given with a hind of humor even in its
most serious moments.

On the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the graduation of His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, from Halki Seminary, the Hellenic History Foundation with Greek and Turkish historians undertook the realization of a documentary on the history of Halki's Theological School. By tracing the historical background of the School through the accounts of its graduates and academic staff, we were taken on a journey through the islands of Kalymnos, Thessaloniki, Athens, Istanbul and Heybeliada (Halki).

Thanasis, a good-hearted cotton candy vendor from Athens, has been caring for little Melissa since she was a baby when her mother, an immigrant prostitute, thought it best to leave the girl behind while seeking fortune in America. Her unexpected appearance five years late has traumatic consequences when she takes her child away from Thanasis and leaves. Thanasis, suddenly alone, misses the child who was like a daughter to him and a comfort in his old age. Thanasis decides to travel to America in of seeing her again. He does not have a visa. He does not speak English. He does not have much money. he does not know how to drive a car, and he has never been on an airplane. But he does have a distant cousin, Plato, a professional gambler, living in Las Vegas, who has offered to help him cross the border. A road movie begins as the two disparate cousins from Greece embark on a cross-country adventure to win the smile of a littler girl.

As an architect stuffering from cancer prepares for his impending death, his daughter, Marina, attempts an awkward flight into adulthood. Emotionally stilted at 23, Marina seeks the counsel of her best friend--the promiscuous and instructive Bella--who bluntly guides her through the clumsy physicality of sex. Marina, who prefers to watch the mating rituals of animals on David Attenborough documentaries than to experience them herself, wades through uncomfortable territory for the first time. We glimpse her terse experiments, her fumbles and frank inquiries as she tries to figure out how these things called relationships work. All the while, she shuttles her father to and from the hospital, witnessing his own body deflate. The daily machinations of Marina and Bella unfold against the backdrop of a crumbling mill town wrought firmly in the industrial imagination. Once conceived to be a paradise of production, the town is now a hollow landscape of steel skeletons, deserted construction sites and crumbling "60s mod homes"--a decrepit utopia that Marina's father helped to create. But things still emerge in the wasteland.